Padre FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

Is Padre for Perl only?

While the main focus of Padre is to provide excellent support for both beginner and advanced Perl developers
it is not restricted to Perl development only.
It provides syntax highlighting to most of the languages out there and if you are missing something just ask on the mailing list or open a ticket.
It is also planned to be integrated with Parrot that will allow writing plug-ins in any language running on Parrot.

Why not just reuse an existing Editor?

We hope that by writing it in Perl we will make it easy for any user of Padre to contribute back to the project and/or to add plug-ins.

vi and emacs -- while being excellent tools -- are not very beginner-friendly.

Komodo costs money and is not Free/Open Source software.

Eclipse is huge and you need to know Java to extend it.

Various editors such as Ultra-Edit, Notepad++ etc. are Windows-only

Why does Padre use wxWidgets and not ...?

wxWidgets uses the native windowing widgets of each operating system and in theory that should be the nicest
and most "native looking" on all operating systems. So while it has it own problems and it is not the easiest
to write in it, it might have the best potential.

Why using Subversion when Git is so much better?

We started to use SVN as Gabor did not know Git.
We keep it as it works well for us and a lot more people know SVN than Git.

With that said if someone implements an awesome and simple-to-use
plugin for Padre to integrate with Git that works well on both Windows
and Linux then we can consider switching.

Why using ithreads when forks/coro is so much better?

Threads are the only Perl concurrency system that is portable and actually runs things in parallel and makes use of multiple cores. We needed something portable that does real concurrency (i.e. no cooperative multi-threading or event loop), so fork was out of the loop due to portability and POE/Coro due to cooperative multithreading.

I have trouble installing Padre. Where can I find help?

See Download and the pages linked there for installation instructions.
If this does not bring you any further, contact us, we will see how we can help us.

I have found a bug. What do I do now?

Padre lacks feature XY. What can I do about it?

Or even better: Implement it yourself. Hacking Padre isn't that hard if you know some Perl. And the developer community is very open and welcoming towards new developers.
See Howto and Getting Involved for more information.